Editor’s Note

In the Winter 2014 Academic Questions (vol. 27, no. 4), Patrick J. Deneen, the David A. Potenziani Memorial Associate Professor of Constitutional Studies at the University of Notre Dame, made a provocative argument in “After the Interregnum,” his contribution to the issue’s special section, “God and Guns.” Deneen claimed that the opposition that arose in the 1980s to the politicization of the academy and the corruption of the liberal arts did not point to an abiding alternative to the countercultural assault on higher education. Deneen argued that the era of the ascendancy of liberal arts core curricula, to which the opposition hoped to return, had only been an “interregnum” between two approaches to higher education based on competing ideas of liberty.

“In this essay, I advance two connected arguments,” Deneen wrote:

(1) the conservative aims of the “first” culture wars